“One of the most extraordinary books ever issued by an American commercial publisher,” Blueprint for Counter Education was designed as a portable, interdisciplinary learning environment for a new, politically active, process-based model of education. Originally issued by Doubleday in 1970, the publication offered a fluid cosmology of radical thought and syncretic bibliography conceived in the classrooms of the sociologists Maurice Stein and Larry Miller and given form by the designer Marshall Henrichs as a boxed set of three large graphic posters and a “Shooting Script.” Blueprint served as the blueprint for the humanities curriculum at Cal Arts in the early 1970’s, where Stein and Miller founded the School of Critical Studies. In 2016 Blueprint was reissued in facsimile with an added booklet of reflections and interviews about the original by Harvard’s Jeffrey T. Schnapp (VC’75) and the designer Adam Michaels, published by Michaels’ Inventory Press.

A centerpiece of the Walker Art Center’s recent “Hippie Modernism” exhibition, Blueprint will be on display in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center’s focus gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a program which includes a presentation by Schnapp and Michaels on Thursday September 28 at 5:30 p.m. in Taylor Hall 203, followed by an opening reception in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. In addition, there will be a teach-in the following morning beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Friday September 29 in Taylor 203 on the theme: “Radical Pedagogy from Nixon to Trump.” Finally, an accompanying exhibit entitled “Inventory Press LLC and the Design of Contemporary Arts Publishing” will be on display in the Art Library through October 6.

Sponsored by the Agnes Rindge Claflin Fund, The Department of Media Studies, and Creative Arts Across Disciplines (CAAD).